Category Archives: Sexual Market Value

I came across another familiar story on the TRP Reddit this week. It’s familiar because this story is becoming increasingly more common as Hypergamy becomes a more open secret that women can no longer keep under wraps.

For the better part of 2014, and in Preventive Medicine, I explored the social trend of Open Hypergamy and the impact it’s beginning to effect on contemporary western(ized) culture. In that exploration I published Saving the Best (another TRP link), a story which revolved around the increasingly more common post-Epiphany Phase “regrets” women have when their Party Years indiscretions are made evident to the Beta men who committed to them in monogamy or marriage.

Have a read of Saving the Best before you continue here, you’ll see the commonalities immediately. I’m going to dissect this “confession” a bit as I go, but bear in mind this woman’s predicament is the direct result of the unintentional Red Pill awareness that Open Hypergamy has brought men to – even uninitiated Beta men.

An update, for those asking for it. Here’s the link to my original post although the text has been deleted? Before I get into the details, I’d just like to say I greatly appreciate the support this community extended me. Believe it or not, I read every response.

As of this morning, we still hadn’t slept in the same bed or spoken more than 10 words to each other in passing. As I was waking up, he was walking in the front door with two coffees. He sat me down at our kitchen table and finally opened up to me.

Basically he feels that he was “conned” (his word) into the marriage, saying that he wouldn’t have even dated me, let alone married me, if he’d known what he knows now. His view of me has been irreparably changed and he no longer sees me “as someone worthy of being [his] wife”. (quoting him here… fucking prick) Beyond the sexual aspect, he says he no longer trusts me because I “kept something this big” from him our whole relationship.

One of the primary disconnects women are conditioned to believe during their Epiphany Phase is that a “good man” will be willing to forgive and forget her past indiscretions. On their journey of self-exploration and discovery women are encouraged to adopt a finely tuned cognitive dissonance with who they conveniently become and what should be the consequences of their pasts. While men are expected to live up to their responsibilities as men, and are expected to own up to the consequences of their failures, at the Epiphany Phase women are encouraged to convince themselves that they become someone else – someone who was “so different” from who she was in her Party Years.

Her husband feels “conned” because he was conned; conned after discovering the dual personality of his pre and post Epiphany Phase wife. What we’re expected to believe here (courtesy of the social conventions emplaced by the Feminine Imperative) is that her husband is some prudish, moralistic throwback unwilling to accept and embrace the “real” her – the one who was trying to “get it right” by turning over a new leaf with him. This is the easy, ready-to-use shame that women have available to them; if a man becomes indignant over a woman’s sexual past it translates into his insecurities as a man. His feeling conned over his bait & switch marriage is redirected to being his problem.

Men aren’t off the hook with that convenient convention either. There’s a moral high ground many men want to claim and cast the actions of a guy in this circumstance as virtuous and a proper revenge for being mislead. While that may feel good, men in this situation aren’t disillusioned with their ‘unworthy’ wives from a moral pretense, but rather that they believed they would be entitled to their wives’ sexual best reserved for him. As I quoted in Saving the Best, they “marry a whore who fucks like a prude.”

Subjectively that may or may not be the case, but it’s the freedom and genuine desire with which their wives had sex with prior (Alpha) lovers; desire that wasn’t based on material provisioning, emotional investment or the logistical hoops women expect their post-Epiphany “good men” to perform to in order to merit their sexual and intimate attentions. That’s the disconnect, that’s the con; Alpha Bad Boys get her 3-Way genuine sexual abandon with no investment expected, while he’s got to maintain ‘multiple businesses’ in order to get a prosaic sexual experience with her. The Bad Boys got her sexual best for free, while he’s expected to accept her as the ‘new’ post-Epiphany her…

Nothing I could do or say could convince him that these were past mistakes and not reflective of who I am today. He wasn’t angry with me, didn’t call me a slut or anything like that. Never once raised his voice. Part of me wishes he did, although I can’t exactly say why right now. It felt like I was being laid off from a job.

As I mentioned, the expectation is for her husband to accept “who she is today”, yet who she was ten years ago had a more genuine desire for less established, but sexually arousing, lovers. I’m going to speculate here, but it’s likely that a man who owns multiple businesses spent more of his time diligently and (I presume) responsibly cultivating those enterprises than the men his wife took as lovers ten years ago. Again, we can see that as a moral virtue on his part, but there’s a root indignation of what her past represents within the context of his (I assume) responsible past.

And like a good business owner he plays the confrontation calmly and collectedly. The part of her that wishes he’d raised his voice is the same part that got excited by the Alpha indifference of her former lovers.

So that’s it. We are getting divorced. My supposed life-partner turning his back on me without a second thought. He didn’t even have the decency to discuss it with me first – apparently he visited his lawyer during the week and “the process is in motion” (his words). Knowing him, there is absolutely no changing his mind.

My husband owns multiple businesses and wouldn’t get married without a prenup. I signed it, honest-to-god thinking we’d never, EVER have to use it. Well, he had the fucking document with him this morning. He said he’d pay off the remainder of my student loans, which he isn’t “legally obligated” to do. While I appreciate that, I am going to meet with my lawyer this week and see if the agreement can be challenged in court. We have built a life together, I gave him 5 of the best years of my life and I’ve been 100% faithful to him – I don’t fucking deserve to be tossed out like a piece of trash.

So that’s it. My life turned upside-down in the span of a week, over something I did 10+ YEARS AGO BEFORE I EVEN KNEW HIM. It’s fucking asinine. The thing is, even as I wrote the original post, in the back of my mind I knew he was through with me. He’s ended friendships and business partnerships over less.

Ghosts of Epiphanies Past

In Preventive Medicine I go into a bit of detail about men in this increasingly common circumstance. There is a subconscious expectation on the part of Beta men who find themselves at or just past women’s Epiphany Phase, that predisposes them to believing that what they’ve become as a result of their perseverance throughout their 20’s has now come to fruition and the women who ignored them then have now matured to a point where he’s the ‘sexy’ one at last.

Unless men have a moment of clarity or a Red Pill initiation of their own prior to this, what they don’t accept is that this expectation is a calculated conditioning of the Feminine Imperative to prepare him for women like this; women who can no longer sexually compete for the Alpha Fucks they enjoyed in their Party Years. The Feminine Imperative teaches him that he can expect a woman’s “real” sexual best from the “real” her – why else would she agree to a lifelong marriage if he weren’t the optimal choice to settle down with? Why wouldn’t she be even more sexual than in her past with the man she’s chosen to spend her life with and have children with?

That is the message the Feminine Imperative used to subtly and indirectly imply to Betas-in-waiting. Now with the comfort of Open Hypergamy this message is published in best selling books by influential women:

“When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home. These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is sexier.”

― Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

Not to belabor Sandberg yet again (she has been hocking the tired out Choreplay meme recently), but this is essentially the outline of the script we’re reading in this woman’s lament. She’s essentially followed Sandberg’s advice only to find that her Beta-in-waiting bought into the same script too. The problem for her is that he took the “nothing’s sexier” part to heart only to find that someone else was sexier long before she’d convinced him otherwise.

For what it’s worth, fem-centrism has far less to fear from the manosphere revealing the ugly Red Pill truths about Hypergamy and more to worry about from pridefully self-indulgent women gleefully explaining it to the general populace themselves. Roosh had a tweet this week with what would likely have been the attitude of our subject wife ten odd years ago:

The more common Open Hypergamy becomes and the more proudly it’s embraced by the whole of women the less effective shaming men into acceptance of it will be. However, I thought it was entertaining when the counter-comments on Saving the Best questioned how common this situation really was or else thought it was trolling.

I think it’s much more prevalent than most men would like to admit. Perhaps not as dramatic as this example, but far more common for a majority of men who’ve tacitly accepted that the woman they married (or paired with) gave her best to her prior lovers and are too personally or family invested to extricate themselves from her after they’ve realized it. That investment necessitates them convincing themselves of the pre-planned memes the Feminine Imperative has prepared for them – that they are doing the right thing by forcing that dissonance out of their minds.

A lot of Betas-in-waiting like to claim a personal sense of vindication about their successfully pairing and breeding with women who they believe are (and were) their SMV evaluate equals once those women have “got it out of their system” with regards to self-discovery and Alpha indiscretions. In a sense they’re correct; often enough these are the men who gratefully embrace a woman’s intimate acceptance of him precisely at the point when his SMV has matured to match this woman’s declining SMV. I call this crossover the comparative SMV point in my SMV graph.

Even women on the down-slide of their SMV like to encourage the idea that their post-Epiphany decision to marry the Plan B Beta provider (long term orbiter) is evidence of their newly self-discovered maturity. How could they have been so foolish and not seen how the perfect guy for her had been there all along? That consideration gratifies the ego of a Beta who’s been hammered flat by rejection or mediocre experiences with women up to that point.

The primary reason I spent the last year compiling Preventive Medicine was to help men see past the compartmentalization of women’s phases of maturity, but also to help them see past their own immediate interpretations of those phases as they’re experiencing them. Long term sexual and intimate deprivation (i.e. Thirst) will predispose men to convincing themselves of the part they believe they should play in the social conventions of the Feminine Imperative. Their own cognitive dissonance is a small, subliminal price to pay when they believe they’re finally being rewarded with a woman who’s now ready to give him her best.

What inspired me to this post was reading a cutesy photo-meme on Facebook. The syrupy message was “My only regret was not meeting you sooner so we could spend more of our lives together” superimposed over some kids in black & white holding a rose. Then it hit me, this was a message a guy was posting to his girlfriend; the one he’d met after his second divorce was finalized. What he didn’t want to think about was that if he’d met her sooner she’d have been too busy “discovering herself” to have anything to do with him.

The heart of all this is: in a woman’s mind, humans have three genders. Women, alphas, and betas. The problem is, it’s difficult to distinguish between the latter two as there are no clear biological markers; a few un-fakeable traits like height and muscularity give an indication, similar to how long hair tends to indicate a woman, but not infallibly so.

But women have different relationships with them. To women, betas are friends, helpers, co-workers, employees, servants; unless related by blood, they are practical beings only. There is no romance to them. They are useful, fun, maybe even someone to be a little affectionate toward so long as they remain useful, but they have no deeper self, no soul, no mystical thing to bind to.

Alphas are something else entirely. They are actually people – people drenched with desire, romance, spirit. Him, she can respect. In greater cases even worship. It matters little how well he performs objectively, so long as he does nothing to make her doubt her assessment of him as alpha. If he does perform, she admires and praises his performance – but she’s doing that about something or another regardless, even if she’s gushing about how he bought her a bag of skittles.

No woman will stand beside a beta as he faces, and succumbs to, death. Not unless it’s convenient, or she would be shamed otherwise. It simply would not make sense for her to do so. Would you hold your employee’s hand as they lay dying? Only if they had a fatal accident right in front of you. Past that, condolences to the kids.

Men see two genders. Men and women. Better and worse, more and less attractive, but no fundamental difference. Without being trained in a (for us) counterintuitive mindset, we will by default project our understanding of gender upon women. And so we try to improve our beta game, instead of flipping the script.

The blue pill is miserable because it is learned helplessness. From within, it is the cracking of an invisible whip, punishment meted capriciously and without time or reason. There is no pattern or method to the blue pill man’s pain.

FTS must’ve been reading my mind this week because his comment made a perfect segue into what I’ve been developing this week. The most salient part of this comment, I thought, was “Without being trained in a (for us) counterintuitive mindset, we will by default project our understanding of gender upon women.”

This was a good observation because there are intrinsic parts of the male psychological firmware that the Feminine Imperative picked up on long ago and deliberately co-opts to better aid in optimizing women’s control of Hypergamy.

From the utility-need side of Hypergamy, this mostly manifests in various forms of serviceable security. The Beta Bucks aspect of Hypergamy can be distilled to a need for security, protection, and a certainty that a woman and her offspring will be insured against any uncertainty. Every psychological and sociological dynamic that contributes to feminine-primacy keys on this need for existential certainty. The War Brides dynamic, the evolution from old-order chivalry to modern feminism, and now the social / legal handicapping of men to ensure that feminine-security certainty above all other considerations are all manifestations of this need.

The Feminine Imperative learned long ago that men’s innate protectorate instinct for the feminine was its second most valuable means of masculine control – the first being men’s ‘always on’ sexual impetus. Thus pairing the two as a means of control is a simple deductive proposition for the imperative. The rudimentary connection being, “protect the woman and I get sex.”

This is the unspoken exchange that’s part of our evolutionary past. Men are nothing if not deductive (yet creative) problem solvers, and women have used this to their hypergamous advantage since our hunter-gatherer beginnings.

This is what confounds modern men under the auspices of our present feminine-primary social order. We’re emphatically told that women “never owe men sex“, yet the latent message is, and has always been, “but, if you perform to her satisfaction, she might be more inclined to give you sex.” Carrot to pull the cart, I know, but this mental algorithm is a sociological buffer for women – exclude the sexually unworthy, but leave an acceptable caveat in order to leverage the possibility of sex with those who are still useful in providing security.

Bear this in mind the next time you read a story about a savior White Knight who was beaten to a bloody pulp for his effort to protect a woman from the “predations” of some Alpha(s) she likely wants to bang anyway. Men will project, by default, our own gender interpretation onto women, and sometimes pay the price for it. Betas believe the feminine-primary, equalist advertising that men and women are functional equals while still force fitting an expected, old-order, male-protectionism (completely based on an unequal state presumption) into that belief – often at their own expense.

Invisible Men

While I disagree that there are no distinct physical and cultural markers that women use (sometimes subconsciously) to distinguish Alpha men from the bulk of Beta men, I strongly agree with the distinction and characterization Forge the Sky makes with how women regard Beta men.

The vast majority of men are sexually invisible to women, but all males are visible in terms of their utility to women and the role those men are expected to play in deference to women’s solipsism.

There’s an important difference in that visibility with respect to men and women we need to consider.

I expect that female readers will trot out the “ooh, ooh, men do it too” counter that women are invisible to men who don’t see them as a sexual prospect. That may be the case, particularly for mature women convinced they should be sexually viable into their 50s, however, those women’s functional utility is never an issue for men. Neither is it an article of attraction for a man. As much as a feminine-centric culture would like to convince women of the opposite, men simply don’t factor a woman’s provisional utility into their attraction equation.

Invisible men never become visible to women until either those men intrude on a woman’s’ awareness or she has a specific utilitarian need of him. At this point, whether due to arousal / attraction awareness or her specific need (usually protection or security insurance), that man must perform to prove his maleness. He must qualify for her visual acknowledgment of him.

Over prolonged periods, this invisibility, and the fear of having his insistence rejected, can influence men’s overall perception of women and their intergender interpretations. Invisible men tend to confuse a woman’s utility interests in him as genuine indicators of interest (IOIs). The Feminine Imperative prepares for this ‘mixed message’ with a constant, self-perpetuating social narrative that tells the invisible men they are never, under any circumstance, owed a woman’s intimacy – it is always a gift, a reward, for her approval.

Despite this aspect of their social conditioning, the Invisibles still read more into those IOIs and perceive that a woman’s attraction is a genuine extension their own serviceability. This is the foundation of the Savior Schema. Much of what the manosphere considers sexual ‘thirst’ is a direct result of the scarcity mentality that results from an Invisible becoming an unexpected service-providing option for a woman.

Invisible men become more compliant when women’s utility needs make them visible. They confuse their use with genuine appreciation and desirability.

If we consider the 80 / 20 rule of the sexual marketplace and figure that 80% of Beta men are sexually invisible to women we get a broader perspective of how the gender landscape has evolved in an era where women’s security-side needs are planned for and met with a relative degree of certainty.

I had a teenage kid I used to consult who related this story about how one of his nerdy friends had somehow spontaneously generated the interest of a girl who was an obvious two points above his SMV. His initial frustration was one of wonderment about how this guy could be ‘dating’ so hot a girl while he wasn’t bumping the needle with even the girls he thought were a point below himself.

His nerdy friend assumed the predictable self-righteous Beta position that some “special” girls just understand and appreciate guys like him in favor of the brutish jocks “society tells them they should like.” All this came two weeks before that year’s homecoming dance (and after-party), where she promptly left him to go dance and party with her girlfriends and their jock guy-friends for the rest of the evening.

This kid had served his utilitarian purpose of fronting the money for the evening, a limo, corsage, photos (of their group) and the bit of risky underage liquor he could manage. In spite of all that he still refused to make the connection of his being used for her purpose. Invisibles feel validated in their own manipulation because that utility made them visible (“do my homework nerd”) even if just momentarily. As bad as that extortion was, that brief moment of visibility implies the prospect that another woman in the future (a really special one) will also appreciate his utility and reward it with her intimacy.

Needless to say, this visibility differential becomes an internalized factor in men’s approach to women. There are ways an invisible man can make himself visible; all require effort and risk. As I stated before, a man remains invisible unless his physical presence and arousal prompts make him unignorable, his performance is outstanding enough to draw attention or he simply asserts his visibility towards that woman. Physical bearing and performance recognition being the Alpha Fucks side of the Hypergamy equation is an easy follow, but a man asserting himself and his personality is where the Red Pill and applied Game come into play. This prospect will always imply risk of rejection until such a time that an Invisible’s confidence supersedes his self-image as an invisible.

We had a long discussion in the last thread about the mindset of the MGTOW contingent of the manosphere and the sentiment of men wishing to remove themselves wholesale from the sexual marketplace. I understand this sentiment and I know men, like Advocatus Diaboli, who have legitimately recused themselves from the SMP, but it seems to me this want is the result of having been invisible to women for so long. They get to a point where they become invisible by choice.

The Third Sex

I can’t finish this essay without drawing attention to FTS’s first observation:

The heart of all this is: in a woman’s mind, humans have three genders. Women, alphas, and betas. The problem is, it’s difficult to distinguish between the latter two as there are no clear biological markers; a few un-fakeable traits like height and muscularity give an indication, similar to how long hair tends to indicate a woman, but not infallibly so.

After I’d reconsidered this I had to dig out my copy of Plato’s Symposium and pore through it to read the part where Aristophanes proposed that there were, in fact, three sexes (in primal times) that their all-male discussion collective ought to consider:

There were three sexes: the all male, the all female, and the “androgynous,” who was half male, half female. The males were said to have descended from the sun, the females from the earth and the androgynous couples from the moon.

A lot is being made of transgenderism recently and the fluidity with which people want to arbitrarily “gender-identify” borders on the ridiculous, but FTS’s observation has more implications than I think most are aware of. I’m sorry to go all philosophus on you, but I can definitely see parallels with the symbolism Aristophanes suggests and the female perceptions of the division of maleness FTS brings out here. Although Aristophanes would say that these primal beings split into gays, lesbians and heterosexual beings, I’d suggest that this primal awareness stems from a male understanding of the division of Alpha and Beta men and how women perceive them, visibly and non-visibly.

So powerful is this sense of entitlement, so consuming and convinced of the correctness of their purpose is the feminine that women will literally breed and raise generations of men to better satisfy it. Hypergamy is cruel, but nowhere more so than in the relationship between a mother overtly raising and conditioning a son to be a better servant of the feminine imperative.

But to breed a better worker, the feminine imperative’s queens can’t afford to have any corrupting, masculine, outside influence. On a societal scale this might mean removal (either by disincentives or forcibly) of a father from the family unit, but this is the easy, extreme illustration. There are far more subtle social and psychological means that the imperative uses to effect this filtering – via mass media, social doctrines, appeals to (feminized) morality, the feminine is placed as the correct imperative while the masculine is filtered out or apologetically tolerated as vestiges of an immature and crude reminder of masculinity’s incorrectness.

Yet for all of this social engineering Hypergamy still demands satisfaction of women’s most base imperative, Alpha seed. The queens need physically / psychologically dominant drones – if just for a season and at their ovulatory pleasure. While beta workers are endlessly vetted in sisyphean tasks of qualifying for the acceptance of the feminine imperative, the Alpha drones live outside this shell; their qualifications only based on how well they satisfy the feminine’s visceral side of hypergamy.

The great irony of this social solution to hypergamy and long term parental investment is that the vast majority of the offspring of this arrangement would be raised to be better workers. Those betas-to-be boys must be insulated from the corrupting influence of the drones lest they devolve into the Alphas they crave yet cannot control. It may seem counterintuitive, to raise what should ostensibly be optimized genetic stock as a cowed, sometimes medically restrained, feminized beta males. However it is through this harsh conditioning that truly dominant Alphas must rise above. Essentially the genetic lottery isn’t won by women in such a social environment – it’s men, or the ones who rise above in spite of the conditioning efforts of the feminine imperative.

I thought this was an interesting take from Striver in this week’s comments. I think this part has some merit…

Once gut level violence is tempered, men want to be the hero, the doer, who is rewarded for his deeds by a woman or women. Game is inherently feminine, an admission that women have won. Game involving talking and “communication” – does that sound masculine?

However, I disagree with him here…

As far as whether Game is necessary, any sex that doesn’t produce surviving offspring is just recreation. If your n count is 100, and no babies are produced or all potential babies are aborted, then it’s the same as n count 0 except for how it makes you feel. If women choose to sleep with the alpha players, then have babies with the beta shlubs, that’s the COMPLETE game.

This fundamentally ignores the biological root of women’s Hypergamy. The ideal evolutionary outcome is for a woman to optimize Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks. Ideally a woman who breeds and consolidates on monogamy with a man best exemplifying these aspects is the evolutionary “winner”. If that’s not possible, or not optimal, the ideal evolutionary winner is the woman who breeds with an Alpha Fucks man, and consolidates provisioning with a Beta Bucks man.

A lot of Blue Pill men feel a sense of vindication for the Epiphany Phase “success” they finally get with women once their long-term usefulness to women finally outweighs women’s ability to attract more Alpha Fucks ideal men. It’s a validation of their self-styled perseverance and some qualifier of what they convince themselves is the ‘real‘ attractiveness women have for that self-righteous Beta provisioning.

The fact is that this is an old-order, old-SMP misbelief. In all of the eras preceding the advent of unilaterally feminine controlled birth control both sexes shared in the social responsibility of controlling women’s innate Hypergamy (AF/BB). However left to her own, unconditioned, expectation to responsibly assume control of her Hypergamy, women default to separate ideals for Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks.

In other words, women prefer a breeding model that separates men into two different varieties – the kinds of men women want to fuck and the kind they want to marry – or “the kind of man your mother wants you to marry and the kind of guy you leave him for to be with.”

So ensaturated into our social fabric is this understanding that even men will reinforce the archetypes. I have a 16 year old daughter, and even Rollo Tomassi would want his girl to be with ‘truck guy’ instead of ‘girly car guy’. Across all generations it just makes better sense, right?

I’ve mentioned this before in the Myth of the Good Guy. It’s amazing to me that men still seem to think they can embody the nobler aspects of both the Alpha Jerk and the comforting Beta to become a mythical Good Guy that women will naturally recognize, appreciate and prefer in comparison to the Jerkish Alpha Bad Boy or the Sympish Beta Nice Guy. The sell is one of combining the best of both archetypes and thereby satisfying women’s need for an optimized Hypergamy.

The mistake in this, of course, is presuming women have the foresight to identify and appreciate the aspects that should satisfy an optimized state of Hypergamy. What Good Guys don’t consider is that women simply don’t have the depth of experience with men needed to recognize or appreciate ‘the best of both types’ at various phases of their maturity.

For instance, young women in their peak SMV years (22-24) are simply not the demographic of women who complain of men’s lack of maturity, their unwillingness to commit or how they need to Man Up and accept some ‘grown up’ responsibilities. Peak SMV age women aren’t concerned with long term commitments or provisioning from nice, dependable, Beta men – they’re too preoccupied with enjoying that SMV peak with Alpha lovers, and understand that offers of commitment from Beta men are cheap and plentiful.

Yet even for an older, presumedly wiser, generation, the resourceful Alpha “has more sex appeal” than the sensitive, attentive, comforting Beta Herb male.

At least with the dick, there’s a spark there — even if it’s just one you’re trying to catch. At least with the asshole, you’re wasting your time on someone entertaining. At least with the guy who’ll bring you undeniable rage and pain, there’s a feeling there.

The problem with Good Guy ambitions of being the best of both Alpha excitement and Beta comfort is that women are incapable of appreciating either of these aspects simultaneously. The predominant need women feel for Beta comfort, dependability and provisioning during their Epiphany Phase just prior to the Wall is unrelatable to a woman in her peak SMV years when her predominant sexual focus is on exciting Alpha recklessness.

I speculated in Myth of the Good Guy that in today’s sexual marketplace women simply don’t believe the average man is capable of being the best of both types. I still hold to that assertion – only apex Alpha celebrity men are in anyway believable, but mostly due to women creating this optimized character for themselves. However, and probably more importantly, women aren’t interested in Alpha excitement and Beta trustworthiness in the same place, in the same man, at the same time.

This separation of Alpha exciting men from dependable (but boring) Beta men is a direct result of the social “empowerment” women have been afforded, and socially engineered by the Feminine Imperative, for the past 5 generations.

This separate-guys-for-separate-purposes is the end game for Socialized Hypergamy – left to the unilateral control of women, Hypergamy doesn’t recognize men who embody a long term optimization of Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks. Instead Hypergamy, unfettered by social restraint, prefers short term mating with exciting, but dangerous Alpha genetic potential, and an enforced long term responsibility to the cuckoldry of parentally invested, emotionally invested, dependable Beta providers.

The separate need for these archetypes does not occur at the same time in a woman’s progression of maturity. In fact the only area of overlapping need for these types is exactly the pre-Wall ages of 29-31 for women (i.e. the Epiphany Phase), the age range when the majority consensus of women agree that they want to marry and settle down.

From a strictly evolutionary perspective Striver’s assertion that Betas get the last laugh in the genetic olympics is correct. Nice Guys may finish last, but no one says they don’t finish at all. But do they finish best?

Unfortunately, on a subconscious level, women’s sexual strategies, which then translate into social doctrine, develop contingencies for duping Betas into provisioning for children not their own, or are ‘outsourced’ as parents once they’ve been removed from the family unit. Either that or they’re relegated to progressively sexless status of nominally male providership and parental investment.

A Beta fathering children is common, but there’s more to raising a child than just the combining of alleles.

You’ll notice I titled this post “Are the cads outbanging the dads?” That was deliberate, because there remain questions about whether cads are actually breeding more or less than dads. Outbanging is different than outbreeding. A woman could casually ignore potential beta dads throughout her teens and 20s (her prime years) for a sterile ride on the cock carousel with alpha males, only to settle down later with a beta male and bear him 1.8 children. Cheap and easy contraceptives thwart the natural procreation advantage that alpha males would normally have over beta males in the state of nature, so it is very possible that alpha males could be winning the Banging Sweepstakes while losing the Breeding Sweepstakes.

Evidence that cad outbanging and supercharged female hypergamy is occurring resides in the later age of first marriage rates, and the lower overall marriage rate, as well as the higher STD rates among women.

And there is evidence for cad outbreeding as well. Serial monogamy — which is a form of soft polygyny — is on the rise, and men who have had more than one partner have more childrenthan men married to one woman.

On the other side of the debate are the GSS (General Social Survey) gurus who marshal self-reported evidence that dads are winning the breeding wars over cads.

I remain skeptical of the GSS data, but give it its due. My contention has never been that cads are having more children, but rather that cads are having more premarital sex than dads with higher quality (read: better looking) women when those women are in their sexual primes. This, not the discrepancy in fertility rates between alpha and beta males, is the contraceptively-aided shock wave that is roiling the sexual market and upending organic rules thousands, perhaps millions, of years old.

A society of both cad ascendence and civilization is unsustainable and incompatible. One or the other will go, and the pendulum with either swing back to dads or civilization will regress to accommodate the rise of women choosing cads. All social and economic indicators (particularly the debt overhang), and my personal experience in the bowels of the dating market, lead me to be pessimistic about a happy resolution to this building tension. Hopefully, I’m wrong, but in the meantime I’ll do what is necessary to secure my pleasure.

If the Chevy Colorado commercial is any gauge of our current sexual marketplace (and I realize it was supposed to be satirical), the female meta-desire for Alpha breeding opportunities far outstrips any notion that more Beta men are the preferred long-term parental mating choice of optimized Hypergamy.

This commercial is yet another shinning example of mainstream society’s increasing comfort with Open Hypergamy. In that post I outlined the conflict that occurs between women comfortable and prideful about revealing the duplicity of their sexual strategy, and the women less able to capitalize on that openness and cling to a secretive Hypergamy. However, men too are invested in that conflict.

When laws mandate a father be held financially and provisionally responsible for children that are not biologically his own (either by his choice or a woman’s overt cuckoldry) you can see how Hypergamy is literally an imperative that directs men’s lives to optimize it. In a social order founded upon women’s unrestricted Hypergamous influences no man, Truck Guy or Prius Guy, is ever truly the father of his child.

If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.

One of the more contentious aspects of intersexual competition the early PUAs hit upon was the phenomenon of the AMOG – Alpha Male Of Group – and how ‘that guy’s’ apparent social dominance focused all interaction within a peer group on himself. The AMOG was an easy parody of a guy to hate on for early Game practitioners because his archetype was so relatable for men looking to improve their chances with women they’d never been able to consider before they discovered Game. The nefarious AMOG was their worst cock-blocking villain.

For a recovering Beta experimenting with Game for the first time it was bad enough that the very real, in-his-face proposition of rejection by women was always to be considered, but to have to account for a guy that looked (in his mind) like the typical jock who regularly out-Alpha’d him back in high school seems like an unfair obstacle to need to overcome. I think that a lot of men’s competition anxiety focuses on a very overdramatized caricature of the Alpha ‘bullies’ they were familiar with when growing up.

This characterization is also the basis of the long-clichéd plot of every boy-meets-girl, boy-overcomes-shyness, boy-overcomes-bully-to-get-the-girl story ever told, and not just by Hollywood.

While female written romance stories revolve around multiple suitors for a woman protagonist to tame the most Alpha among them – usually ending with the one who’s a misunderstood asshole to everyone but her – male written romance generally centers on an underperforming Beta male (with a heart of gold) who, through extraordinary circumstance is placed in a position of outperforming all of his previous rivals for his dream girl, or the girl he ‘should really be with’ instead of the shallow girl he thought would be so great. Instead of selfishly abusing his newfound Alpha powers by kicking sand in the faces of lesser Betas, he fashions himself as the hero exemplar of how Betas should act if they find themselves in a similar empowerment.

The stories of Spider Man, Captain America and even Back to the Future follow these male-romance scripts to the letter, but in every case the Beta-with-a-chance has to teach the bully a lesson before he can qualify for the girl’s attention, much less her intimacy. This clichéd story arch is a manifestation of men’s internalized understanding of their burden of performance. And while I can’t entirely assert this is an intrinsic part of men’s own mental firmware, I have to speculate that the fantasy of fulfilling it is part of men’s ubiquitous need to adequately perform for women’s intimate approval.

Regardless, the objective purpose is still to ‘get the girl’.

Examples of this Alpha bully archetype are part of most men’s formative learning. Not all men learn the lesson of the bully (some play the role with relish), but if we hold to the 80/20 rule of the manosphere we’re statistically looking at around 80% of (Beta) men who do. From grade school to high school to college, that guy, the douchebag, the guy who can’t help but actively or passively draw attention to himself, becomes the AMOG – and damned if he’s not the most contemptible bastard (or type of bastard) you know.

I’m highlighting that guy because more often than not he’s less a real person and more a manifestation of the anxiety that results from men’s insecurity about performing adequately for feminine approval. It’s easy to poke fun at the guys you see on hotchickswithdouchebags.com because they’re representations of the bully you hate. They’re the Jerks that every woman loves and every ‘normal’ guy vainly tries to make women rationally understand are the worst possible romantic option for them.

One very difficult hurdle men have in unplugging is getting past what they believe is the emulation of the Alpha Jerk who so regularly outperformed them, if not bullied them – yet, his asshole ways were still undeniably effective with the women he wanted to get with. Thus, for men who come to Red Pill awareness there’s a natural resistance to become that guy.

This AMOG archetype impression is tough to confront for men, but it’s important they do so.

This impression for men is an incredibly useful tool to effect women’s sexual strategy later in life when the woman (or type of woman) he’s held in such high regard and pined to be intimate with for so long finally “comes to her senses” around her Epiphany Phase and accepts him. For men with this AMOG mental impression, that woman’s acceptance comes with a certain degree of (sometimes smug) vindication. He waited her out and finally she’s “realized” what he’s been trying to make her see for so long – he’s actually the ‘perfect boyfriend’ for her.

He doesn’t realize he’s just playing the convenient ‘savior’-provider role women’s sexual strategy has conditioned and prepared him for, but believing his Beta Nice Guy life track has finally won out over the nefarious AMOG in his head is a strong reinforcer of a belief women need him to strongly believe when it’s time to cash in their Beta Bucks chips and her SMV starts its decline.

And therefore those skilled in war bring the enemy to the field of battle and are not brought there by him.

I’m going to flip your AMOG impression upside down now. That AMOG isn’t the one you should concern yourself with.

Most of the first PUAs always suggested a process of containment and isolating your target woman in order to ‘poach’ her from that guy. I understand the proposed isolation idea is to remove a girl you like from her social group, but the effect is really similar to Mate Guarding – isolate her awareness of all other sexual competitors and focus her on yourself.

However, unless you’re making your approaches in clubs or loud bars it’s likely the context you’re working on a woman in isn’t one where an active, in-your-face AMOGing is happening. Isolation becomes a security measure to focus her on you being her best immediate prospect.

Roissy once stated that there are groupies for every male endeavor, I should also add that there are AMOGs in every male endeavor. Every group of nerdy programmers, geeks, chess club, your bowling team and even in your Bible study group, there’s an AMOG. Some are more significant than others, but rest assured, you know him, or you will.

Most men will compartmentalize themselves socially so as to best facilitate their chances of meeting, banging, marrying or otherwise interacting with women. This compartmentalization is really a form of Buffering against rejection, but it’s also a logical social positioning of a man putting himself into an environment where he can (hopefully) excel and be noticed for it.

All warfare is based on deception – Bear this in mind when you enter into a new social group dynamic or an unfamiliar social environment. You are an unknown commodity and therefore your strengths are novel to the group. Your weaknesses (your Beta-ness) will be more obvious than your strengths and thus more easily attached to you.

Playing to one’s strengths usually involves defining a man’s social environments. King Douchebag at a Vegas pool party is excelling in his environment, just as Bobby Fisher is at a chess tournament. One reason less ‘socially adept’ men enjoy more confidence at a ComicCon is because the environment buffers their social deficits, but emphasizes their particular talents. The first mistake most men make when considering an AMOG situation is underestimating the importance of that environment. In high school the environment was probably set for you, but as an adult you’ve got a greater degree of control over it.

Bear this in mind when you’re confronted with a guy “all the girls love”. There’s a tendency on the part of Beta leaning guys to think the AMOG is a ‘natural’ Alpha when in fact he’s really domain dependent on the social environment you share with him. Of course there will always be guys who excel in almost any environment because Hypergamy is universal to women and a ‘hawt guy’ is ‘hawt’ to all women, but remove him from his preferred domain to one you’re better adept in, or, outperform him in his domain with a particular strength or expertise you possess in such a way that he’s forced to acknowledge your skill.

To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy.

The caricature of an in-your-face belligerent AMOG is really a social anomaly, and usually your experience of him is the product of an environment you’re not at home in. Far more common however is the AMOG who is unassuming, affable, and honestly a guy you probably can’t help but like. In fact this likability is his primary appeal. Obvious Alpha superiority combined with even a marginal humility makes for an irresistible AMOG to women.

One of my best friends to this day was a guy I despised when we were in high school. We ended up becoming lifelong friends, but initially I hated him for having such a natural Alpha affinity with the girls I wanted to get with. I actually attribute part of my early 20s sexual success (and if I’m honest some proto-Red Pill awareness) to many of the lessons women’s behavior around him taught me.

Both the nervous Beta and the PUA like to encourage the idea of an AMOG as being the drunk, loud-mouthed frat boy who pushes you aside to get to the girl at the bar you’re sarging (“Step aside McFly!”), but the Alpha Male of the Group to really consider is the guy women can’t stop talking about when he’s not even present. He’s the guy who leaves the room and girls giddily huddle together to agree about how ‘hawt’ he is. He doesn’t even have to be in the group to be the Alpha of it.

The best form of social proof is the unsolicited kind. The kind where women can’t help but talk about a guy, and ask his Beta-chump friends how they can get to know him better.

He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, will be victorious.

In the immediate sense, unseating this AMOG would be a challenge only the most exceptional men could hope for. He’s established in his environment and his status and social proof is perpetuated for him within his social group. This situation may seem hopeless, and if your goal is to supplant him you’d have to really consider what the rewards would be in doing so, however there is much to learn from him within your shared environment.

Pose as a friend, act as a spy. Befriending the AMOG may be your best option as it opens you up to his social proof as a peer. You may not replace him in the short term, but if you’re spinning plates as you should, his confirmation of you as a peer will only benefit you. This confirmation will allow you an insight into the dynamics of that social environment. Your ultimate success doesn’t lie in destroying the AMOG, or becoming one yourself, but mastering a shared environment in which your strengths are best applied.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance. The opportunity to secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.

This tact is useful for both the in-your-face AMOG as well as the non-direct, status affirmed AMOG. Sometimes proving one’s superiority is simply allowing the mediocre enough time and opportunity to self-destruct. The trick of course is in being prepared to swiftly capitalize on that AMOG’s missteps.

Law 33 – Discover Each Man’s ThumbscrewEveryone has a weakness, a gap in the castle wall. That weakness is usualy an insecurity, an uncontrollable emotion or need; it can also be a small secret pleasure. Either way, once found, it is a thumbscrew you can turn to your advantage.

In the early part of my career in liquor branding I worked for a very rich man in his mid 60s. This guy had quite the resume of “successes”, but for the greater part they’d come from his self-importance and borrowing money than any real talent of his own. He was the owner, but had a reputation for attention seeking and a love of flattery that bordered on arrogance. Usually this would come at the expense of whomever happened to be outshining him as the master.

He was a consummate AMOG, but with no real legitimacy. At one point we had an important negotiation with a Chinese distributor to get our brands into an Asian market and as he’d typically do he wanted to entertain the reps over dinner after a big trade show we’d met them at. They were impressed with me because I was responsible for the creative side of the company, but even with my own deferential credits to my ‘boss’ he took it as an opportunity to AMOG me in front of his new ‘friends’.

I actually saw this coming (it’d happened on other occasions) and I had a good prior knowledge of the sensibilities of the Chinese from my time in doing casino marketing, so I diplomatically let him hang himself with his self-aggrandizement and bluster at my expense. Predictably the reps were off-put by this and we lost the distribution. The good news was that about a year and a half later I was offered a string of very lucrative branding contracts for several of this Asian company’s holdings (2 of which I still front now) because of this patience and letting my boss implode. And all I did was see it coming and let him convict himself.

Every AMOG has a weakness to exploit. Sometimes discovering this requires a patience most guys simply don’t want to wait around for, but with a bit of tact and attention it doesn’t take long. I think the older a man gets the easier it is to judge the character of others (or it should) – you experience the “types” enough to gauge a predictable character action.

There’s an old, but fantastic breakdown of the classic Boyfriend Destroyer script on RSD Nation. I wont repost it here, but if you take a moment to read the script, the premise is one of breaking down a boyfriend’s reputation by indirectly whittling away at the most predictable areas of contention in most relationships. Emphasize his Beta attributes while leading (not telling) her to consider and appreciate your Alpha attributes.

Yes, it’s bad form, and yes, your efforts would be better applied to new prospective plates to spin instead of working on some girl with a boyfriend. However, it is an excellent study in understanding how to deconstruct an AMOG and learning his thumbscrews.

Amused Mastery isn’t just a technique to hold women’s attention, it’s also an effective tool in defusing an AMOG. Once you have an understanding of that AMOG’s weakness – a penchant for self-aggrandizement, a taste for booze or a kind of woman, lack of legitimate ambition, Beta thinking/behavioral tendencies, etc. – the plan then becomes one of emphasizing those character flaws indirectly by exemplifying counter-strengths to those weaknesses.

Women love a man who Just Gets It, and the best, playful way of expressing that is with Amused Mastery; but it’s even more sexy when that Mastery extends to men who she perceives are your intersexual rivals. This then, by association, compliments her ego for your Amused Mastery of her.

Last week saw the publication of the latest paper by Dr. Steven W. Gangestad and Dr. Martie Hasselton titled Human Estrus: Implications for Relationship Science. Anyone who’s read the Rational Male for more than a year is probably familiar with my citing Dr. Hasselton in various posts (her catalog of research has been part of my sidebar links since I began RM), but both she and Dr. Gangstad are among the foremost notable researchers in the areas of human sexuality and applied evolutionary psychology. For this week’s post I’ll be riffing on what this paper proposes with regard to a condition of estrus in women.

In the introduction section of The Rational Male I relate a story of how in my Red Pill formative years I came to be a connector of dots so to speak. While I was studying behavioral psychology and personality studies a great many issues jumped out at me with regards to how many of the principle of behavioral psychology could be (and were already being) applied to intersexual relations. For instance, the basic concepts of intermittent reinforcement and behavioral modification seemed to me an obvious and learned practice of women in achieving some behavioral effect on men by periodically rewarding (reinforcing) them with sex ‘intermittently’. Operant conditioning and establishing operations also dovetailed seamlessly into the Red Pill concepts and awareness I’d been developing for several years prior to finishing my degree.

Since then the ideas I formed have naturally become more complex than these simple foundations, but what I only learned by error was how thoroughly disconnected both students and my teachers were with what I saw as obvious connections. I met obstinate resistance to flat denial when I wrote papers or gave a dissertation about the interplay between the foundations of behaviorism and interpersonal relationships. It was one thing to propose that men would use various aspects to their own advantage, but it was offensive to suggest that women would commonly use behavioral modification techniques to achieve their Hypergamous ends.

This peer resistance was especially adamant when I would suggest that women had a subconscious pre-knowledge (based on collective female experience) of these techniques. I never thought I had brass balls for broaching uncomfortable considerations like this – I honestly, and probably naively, assumed that what I was proposing had already been considered by academia long before I’d come to it.

I was actually introduced to the work of Dr. Hasselton during this time, and along with Dr. Warren Farrell, she’s gone on to become one of my go-to sources in respect to the connection between contemporary behavioral ‘dots’ with theories of practical evolved function in intersexual dynamics. I owe much of what I propose on Rational Male to this interplay, and while I doubt Hasselton would agree with all of what I or the manosphere propose, I have to credit her and her colleague’s work for providing me many of the dots I connect.

I understand that there are still evo-psych skeptics in the manosphere, but I find that much of what passes for their piecemeal “skepticism” is generally rooted in a desire to stubbornly cling to comforting Blue Pill idealisms. That said, I’d never ask any reader to take what I propose here on faith, but personally I’ve found that the questions proposed by evo-psych reflect many of the observations I had in my college days.

Hypergamous Duplicity

For the social theater of the Feminine Imperative, one of the more galling developments in psychological studies to come out of the past fifteen years has been the rise of evolutionary psychology. The natural pivot for the Imperative in dealing with evo-psych has been to write off any concept unflattering to the feminine as being speculative or proving a biased positive (by “misogynistic” researchers of course), while gladly endorsing and cherry-picking any and all evo-psych premises that reinforce the feminine or confirm a positive feminine-primacy.

Up until the past two years or so, there was a staunch resistance to the concept of Hypergamy (know as sexual pluralism in evo-psych) and the dual natures of women’s sexual strategy. Before then the idea of Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks was dismissed as biased, sociologically based and any biological implications or incentives for Hypergamy were downplayed as inconclusive by a feminine-centric media.

However the recent embrace of Open Hypergamy and “Sandbergism” of the last two years has set this narrative on its head, and the empowered women who found the idea of their own sexual pluralism so distasteful are now openly endorsing, if not proudly relishing, their roles in a new empowerment of Hypergamous duplicity.

For those of you that aren’t aware, women now are often out earning men and more of them receive college degrees than men. As of now there aren’t really any programs to help guys out. Assuming this trend continues what do you think will happen to dating? I think that attractive women, will have their pick regardless.

However, for a lot of women, trying to lock down a guy in college will be more of a big deal. I don’t think hook up culture will disappear, but will definitely decrease.

With the exception with my current boyfriend, I have always earned more than any guy I have dated. It has never been an issue. I just don’t have to think about their financials, my attraction is based on their looks and personality. I am guessing the future will be more of that.

I thought this TRP subred was an interesting contrast to the Estrus theory proposed in the Gangstad-Hasselton paper (comments were good too). Yes, the woman is more than a bit gender-egotistical, and yes her triumphalism about the state of women in college and their earning is built on a foundation of sand, but lets strip this away for a moment. The greater importance to her in relating this, and every woman embracing open Hypergamy, is the prospect of better optimizing the dual nature of her sexual strategy.

In many a prior post I’ve detailed the rationales women will apply to their sexual pluralism and the social conventions they rely upon to keep men ignorant of them until such a time (or not) that they can best consolidate on that dualism. Where before that strategy was one of subtle manipulation and pretty lies to keep Betas-In-Waiting ready to be providers after the Alpha Fucks decline at 30, the strategy now is one of such utter ego-confidence in feminine social primacy that women gleefully declare “I’m not just gonna have my cake and eat it too, I’m getting mine with sprinkles and chocolate syrup” with regard to Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks.

The Estrus Connection

For all of the ubiquitous handwringing the manosphere imparts to the social implications of today’s Open Hypergamy, it’s important to consider the biological underpinnings that motivate this self-interested conceit.

In the vast majority of mammalian species, females experience classic estrus or heat: a discrete period of sexual receptivity – welcoming male advances – and proceptivity – actively seeking sex – confined to a few days just prior to ovulation, the fertile window. Only at this time, after all, do females require sex to conceive offspring. The primate order is exceptional. Although prosimians (e.g., lemurs, tarsiers) exhibit classic estrus, the vast majority of simian primates (monkeys and apes) are sexually active for at least several days outside of the fertile period [2]. Humans are an extreme case: Women may be sexually receptive or proceptive any time of the cycle, as well as other nonconceptive periods (e.g., pregnancy).

Do Women Retain a Functionally Distinct Fertile Phase?

Graded sexuality. Women’s sexual activity is not confined to an estrous period. But are women’s sexual interests truly constant across the cycle? Many female primates (e.g., rhesus macaques and marmosets) are often receptive to sexual advances by males outside of the fertile phase, but they initiate sex less [2].

In fact, women’s sexual interests do appear to change across the cycle. Women exhibit greater genital arousal in response to erotica and sexually condition to stimuli more readily during the follicular phase [5-8].

A recent study identified hormonal correlates of these changes by tracking 43 women over time and performing salivary hormone assays [9]. Women’s sexual desire was greater during the fertile window, and was positively related to estradiol levels (which peak just before ovulation), but negatively related to progesterone levels (which rise markedly during the luteal phase).

Changes in the male features that evoke sexual interest. Since the late 1990s, some researchers have argued that what changes most notably across the cycle is not sexual desire per se but, rather, the extent to which women’s sexual interests are evoked by particular male features – specifically, male behavioral and physical features associated with dominance, assertiveness, and developmental robustness. Over 50 studies have examined changes across the cycle in women’s attraction to these male features.

The importance of behavioral features? Whereas preference shifts of major interest early on concerned male physical features (e.g., facial masculinity; scent), several recent studies have focused on women’s reactions to men’s behavior and dispositions. Previous research had found that women find male confidence, even a degree of arrogance, more sexually appealing during the fertile phase [e.g., 15-16]. Recent studies replicate and extend that work, finding not only that fertile-phase women are more sexually attracted to “sexy cad” or behaviorally masculine men (relative to “good dad” or less masculine men), but also that, during the fertile phase, women are more likely to flirt or engage with such men [17,18]. Females of a variety of species, including primates [2], prefer dominant or high ranking males during the fertile phase of their cycles. These males may pass genetic benefits to offspring, as well as, potentially, offer material benefits (e.g., protect offspring). Women’s fertile-phase sexual attraction to behavioral dominance appears to have deep evolutionary roots.

Much of what’s explored here I laid out in Game terms in Your Friend Menstruation over two years ago, but the implications of the behaviors prompted by women’s menstrual cycle and biochemistry strongly imply an estrus-like predictability. This estrous state is a foundational keystone, not just to developing Game, but a keystone to understanding the dynamics behind Hypergamy, women’s dualistic sexual strategy, Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks, and can even be extrapolated into the drive for ensuring feminine social dominance in both overt and covert contexts.

When women embrace a social order founded upon a feminine state of openly revealed Hypergamy they confirm and expose the reality of this estrous state.

Whereas before, in a social order based on concealed Hypergamy, this state could be dismissed as a social construct (and a masculine biased one at that), or one that had only marginal influence to reasoning women with a “higher” human potential. No longer – the confirmation of a true estrus in women via open Hypergamy literally confirms virtually every elementary principle Game has asserted for the past 13 years.

Dual Sexuality

Within the dual sexuality framework, fertile-phase sexuality and non-fertile-phase sexuality possess potentially overlapping but also distinct functions [22,23]. In a number of primate species, extended sexuality – female receptivity and proceptivity at times other than the fertile phase – appears to function to confuse paternity by allowing non-dominant males sexual access [e.g., 24]. These males cannot rule out their own paternity, which might reduce their likelihood of harming a female’s offspring. In humans, by contrast, extended sexuality may function to induce primary pair-bond partners to invest in women and offspring [e.g., 22].

I found this part particularly interesting when you contrast this dynamic with the social resistance that standardized paternity testing has been met with. In a feminine-primary social order based on open Hypergamy, the Feminine Imperative can’t afford not to legislate a mandated cuckoldry. If Beta provider males will not comply with the insurance of a woman’s long-term security (as a result of being made aware of his place in Open Hypergamy) then he must be forced to comply either legally, socially or both. The old order exchange of resources for sexual access and a reasonable assurance of his paternity is replaced by a socialized form of cuckoldry.

Some studies have found that women’s sexual interests in men other than partners are strikingly rare during the luteal phase, relative to the fertile phase [25,26]. Other research has found moderating effects; for example, women who perceive their partners to lack sex appeal experience increased attraction to men other than partners, less satisfaction, and a more critical attitude toward partners, but only when fertile [27,28]. Fertile-phase women in one study were more assertive and focused on their own, as opposed to their partner’s, needs, especially when attracted to men other than partners during that phase [29].

Most research on cycle shifts has been inspired by theory concerning women’s distinctive sexual interests during the fertile phase. One study explicitly sought to understand factors influencing women’s sexual interests during the luteal phase, finding that, at that time, but not during the fertile phase, women initiated sex more with primary partners when they were invested in their relationship more than were male partners [30]. This pattern is consistent with the proposal that extended sexuality functions, in part, to encourage interest from valued male partners. Others have proposed that women’s estrus phase has been modified by pair-bonding.

Initiating sex or being receptive to a primary partner’s sexual interest during the luteal phase (the Beta swing of the cycle) follows when we consider that a woman being sexual during this phase poses the least potential of becoming pregnant while simultaneously (rewarding) reinforcing that primary partner’s continued investment in the pairing with sex (intermittent reinforcement). This is a very important dynamic because it mirrors a larger theme in women’s socio-sexual pluralism – it’s Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks on a biological scale.

Compare this intra-relationship predisposition for Beta sex and contrast it with the larger dynamic of open Hypergamy Alpha Fucks during a woman’s prime fertility window in her peak SMV years, and her post Epiphany Phase necessity to retain a comforting (but decidedly less sexually exciting) Beta provider.

Women’s sexual strategy on a social scale, mirrors her instinctual, estrous sexual strategy on an individual scale.

Cues of Fertility Status
Females across diverse species undergo physical and behavioral changes during estrus that males find attractive: changes in body scents in carnivores, rodents, and some primates; changes in appearance, such as sexual swellings, in baboons and chimpanzees; changes in solicitous behavior in rodents and many primates [2,31] Because women lack obvious cyclic changes, it was widely assumed that cycle shifts in attractiveness were eliminated in humans, perhaps with the evolution of
pair bonding [32].

In 1975, a pioneering study documented increased attractiveness of women’s vaginal odors midcycle [33]. A quarter century later, research revealing other detectable fertile-phase changes began to accumulate, including increased attractiveness of women’s upper torso odors, increased vocal pitch and attractiveness, and changes in women’s style of dress and solicitous behaviors [34]. Meta-analysis of this literature confirms that changes across the cycle in women’s attractiveness are
often subtle, but robust (K. Gildersleeve, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2014).

A notable recent study demonstrated that hormones implicated in attractiveness shifts in non-humans also predict attractiveness shifts in humans [35]. Photos, audio clips, and salivary estrogen and progesterone were collected from 202 women at two cycle points. Men rated women’s facial and vocal attractiveness highest when women’s progesterone levels were low and estrogen levels high (characteristic of the follicular phase, and especially the fertile window).

Emerging evidence suggests that these changes affect interactions between males and females. During the fertile window, women report increased jealous behavior by male partners [25,29,36]. A possible mediator of such changes – testosterone – is higher in men after they smell tshirts collected from women on high- than on low-fertility days of the cycle [37; cf. 38]. A recent study examined related phenomena in established relationships by bringing couples into the lab for a close interaction task (e.g., slow dancing) [39]. Following the interaction, male partners viewed images of men who were attractive and described as competitive or unattractive and noncompetitive. Only men in the competitive condition showed increases in testosterone from baseline – and only when tested during their partner’s fertile phase.

What remains less clear is how we can understand shifts in attractiveness from a theoretical perspective. It is unlikely that women evolved to signal their fertility within the cycle to men [22,34]. In fact, the opposite may have occurred – active selection on women to conceal cues of ovulation, which could help to explain weak shifts in attractiveness relative to many species. Concealment might have promoted extended sexuality with its attendant benefits from investing males, or
facilitated women’s extra-pair mating. Possibly, the subtle physical changes that occur are merely “leaky cues” that persist because fully concealing them suppresses hormone levels in ways that compromise fertility. Behavioral shifts, by contrast, may be tied to increases in women’s sexual interests or motivation to compete with other women for desirable mates [e.g., 40].

Usually after first-time readers have a chance to digest the material I propose in Your Friend Menstruation the first frustration they have is figuring out just how they can ever reliably detect when a woman is in this estrous state. On an instinctual level, most men are already sensitive to these socio-sexual cues, but this presumptuousness of sexual availability is rigorously conditioned out of men by social influence. In other words, most guys are Beta-taught to be ashamed of presuming a woman might be down to fuck as the result of picking up on visual, vocal or body posture cues.

Beyond this perceptiveness, there are also pheromonal triggers as well as behavioral cues during estrus that prompt a mate guarding response in men.

I would however propose that the evolved concealment of an estrus-like state and all of the attendant behaviors that coincide with it are a behavioral mechanic with the purpose of filtering for men with a dominant Alpha capacity to “Just Get It” that a woman is in estrus and thus qualify for her sexual access either proceptively or receptively. Women’s concealed estrus is an evolved aspect of filtering for Alpha Fucks.

In addition, this concealment also aids in determining Beta Bucks for the men she needs (needed) to exchange her sexual access for. A guy who “doesn’t get it” is still useful (or used to be) precisely because he doesn’t understand the dynamics of her cyclic and dualistic sexual strategy. Her seemingly erratic and self-controlled sexual availability becomes the Beta Bucks interest’s intermittent reinforcement for the desired behavior of his parental investment in children that are only indeterminately of his genetic heritage.

Evidence of this intermittent reinforcement can also be observed in what Athol Kay from Married Man Sex Life has described as wives “drip feeding” sex to their husbands. The confines of a committed monogamy in no way preclude the psycho-sexual influences of estrus. Thus placating a less ‘sexy’, but parentally invested man with the reinforcer of infrequent (but not entirely absent) sex becomes a necessity to facilitate the prospect of a future sexual experience with an Alpha while ensuring the security of her Beta.

In closing here I think the importance of how this estrous state influences women on both an individual and social level can’t be stressed enough in contrast to the social embrace of open Hypergamy. The Hypergamy genie is not only out of the bottle, but women are, perhaps against their own interests, embracing the genie with gusto.

Just today Vox posted a quick hit article about how men are discovering that pornography is now preferable to relating with the average woman. In an era of open Hypergamy I don’t believe this is a rationalized preference so much as it’s simply a pragmatic one. Men are rapidly awakening to a Red Pill awareness, even without a formal Red Pill education, and seeing the rewards (the intermittent reinforcement) simply aren’t worth the investment with women who blithely express their expectations of them to assume the role they would have them play in their sexual strategies.

SoSuave and Rational Male reader compleks had a few questions about what he read in The Rational Male book. Since I’ve been doing these weekend questions lately I thought these might make for some interesting discussions. Hopefully they wont distract you from family time this holiday weekend, but maybe they make for some interesting dinner table talk.

Just a side note here, I’m deliberately leaving my own answers less detailed than I normally would so as to inspire your owndiscussions:

If The Rational Male was recommended to me as a book about game, I probably wouldn’t have read it. But my friend who put me onto it basically described it as a life altering piece that would forever change the way I viewed the world of inter-gender relations.

Big sell!

So I read it.

Being freshly unplugged I’m still just awakening from that groggy comatose/confused state. However I feel as though I have a slight head start on at least some of the material. Just by sheer chance, rather than any real research into the subject.

I’ve only ever been in one LTR (2years), and it was with the girl I first hooked up with (she let me sleep with her, better hang onto this one!). Anyway, I ended that (5-6years ago) and have been single ever since, with no desire of entering another relationship.

I started ‘spinning plates’ about a year ago, just through a natural realization that any moral/ethical objection was actually completely unfounded. Not just my own (programmed) objections, but objections from the feminine perspective, which I guess are one in the same. I thought I must have been ‘wired’ differently because I had no desire of settling back into a LTR. I actually argued my case on multiple occasions to avoid it happening.

This book was eye opening and definitely shed some light on issues I never would have even thought to question.

If you care to keep reading I’m just going to spew some thoughts/questions having just finished the book. Keep in mind this is from a very rudimentary understanding of the text.

QUESTIONS

1) Does ONEitis best Hypergamy?
We all know a girl (either personally or anecdotally) who is in a committed relationship with some deadbeat. Everyone knows she can do better, but you can’t possibly convince her to leave him. What factors are at play here? Does SHE suffer from ONEitis to the point that her hypergamous tendencies have been shut off?

Or could it be a case of low self esteem and lack of self worth, so much so that she believes he is the best she can do? Or could he actually just be an Alpha male (albeit a bad example of one)? I’m sure there’s a grey area or middle ground here with many factors potentially at play depending on the specific scenarios. But it’s a pretty common scenario and I’d like to hear what you guys think.

I get this one now and then – “What about this one great looking girl I know who’s stuck on this complete douchebag, deadbeat, scumbag, suckup, :insert invective here:?” While I’m not sold on the idea that women ever get ONEitis for a guy, I am thoroughly convinced that women being 1-2 SMV points below a particular man they’re involved with develop a strong attachment for him.

For women, oftentimes that attachment gets paired with the soul-mate myth. I’d separate that “spiritualism” from the ONEitis a man gets for a woman, but it’s still rooted in the same dynamic – the subconscious realization that this person is the ‘best they can do’ in the SMP.

The reason I’d make the separation between how men experience ONEitis and women is due to the concepts either have when it comes to love. Women’s concept of love is rooted in opportunism as a result of their innate drive towards hypergamous optimization. All this ‘deadbeat’ needs do is be perceptually 1-2 levels above her own perceived SMV and the Alpha prerequisite for Hypergamy is met.

Most guys looking from the outside of that perception in realize the guy’s a fuck up (even Alpha Buddah, Corey Worthington is an example), and we can’t understand why that subjectively hot woman can’t use reason and rationality to see that he is, but then, this is due to our own self-perceptions and our mistaken belief that women’s reason can be appealed to.

2) Genuine Inter-Gender friendships?
Okay, so i don’t have the book with me. But I remember reading a sub-section on inter-gender relationships. It didn’t sit well with me when I read it, but it’s probably something I will have to re-read. I have a lot of female friends. Friendships that go back 15 years. Some of these are very close friends in a completely non-sexual way.

I’m closer with some of these girls than I am with many of my male friends.
Initially these friendships may have blossomed based on the fact that I was a shy kid and didn’t have any ‘intimate’ relationships with women till I was 19. But they are now concreted as some of my most valued friendships.

What is your take on Rollos opinion of inter-gender friendships (as outlined in the rational male)?

My take in the book, and still is, is that men and women cannot be friends in the same way and to the same degree of intimacy that same sex friendships develop.

Men and women cannot be friends in the way or to the degree that most people perceive same sex friendship to be. Now the natural response to this is “I have lots of female friends” or “what are you trying to say, I can’t have female friends, they all haffta be enemies?” Which of course is the standard binary (black or white, all or nothing) retort and the trained AFC thinks anyone suggesting that men and women’s relations as friends could be anything less than equitable and fulfilling is just a neanderthal chauvinist thinking. However, they are incorrect – not because you wouldn’t want to actually be a woman’s friend. There are fundamental differences in the ways men and women view friendship within the framework of their own sex and the ways this transfers to the concept of intergender-friendship.

Quite simply there are limitations on the degree to which a friendship can develop between men and women. The easy illustration of this is that at some point your female “friend” will become intimately involved with another male; at which point the quality of what you perceived as a legitimate friendship will decay. It must decay for her intimate relationship to mature. For instance, I’ve been married for 18 years now; were I to entertain a deep friendship with another female (particularly an attractive female) other than my wife, my interest in this woman automatically becomes suspect of infidelity – and of course the same holds true for women with man-friends. This dynamic simply doesn’t exist for same sex friendships because the sexual aspect is inconsequential.

I should add here that the presumption of an equatable degree, character or quality of intergender friendship (platonic) being the same as a same-sex friendship is a product of the same “we’re-all-the-same-with-different-plumbing” naive equalism that deliberately ignores complementary differences between the sexes.

This presumption is actually a vetting mechanism for women’s control of sexual selection and Hypergamy. The social convention that promotes the idea of equitable concepts of friendship only serves women’s imperative of being able to hold the attentions of multiple male orbiters until such a time that she can optimize both sides of her sexual strategy (Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks). The longer you’re rapt by the idea of an equal intergender friendship, the longer she has to consolidate on whatever side of hypergamy she’s prioritizing at the phase of life she’s in. In other words, the longer you’re in the bullpen, the longer you’ll be a Plan B prospect.

3) Religion vs Evolution vs Habit?
This is a bit abstract. But in terms of a decayed loveless marriage, what would you say are the factors holding these marriages together? Neither party is happy, but they are also unwilling to do anything about it.

One clings to a religious frame as reason to not leave/divorce, as the children are all old enough now that “staying together for the childrens sake” no longer applies.

The other seems completely indifferent and stuck in the routine. Both are mid 50’s and have been married for 30 years and probably just scarred shitless of being alone. But what would you make of this from an ‘unplugged’ point of view. (might be a stretch from the realm of this book, but just curious).

What you’re describing is akin to the phenomenon of Grey Divorce. In the time line from my Preventative Medicine series, I briefly outline what’s known as the 20 year itch – the period of life, usually after 50 around the time a long-married couple becomes ‘empty nesters’ and the binding responsibilities of raising children is at, or almost at an end.

It’s around this phase that a reassessment of one’s partner takes place and the prospects of living out the rest of a life with that person gets serious consideration. This is a phase that’s very telling of the overall prospects of marriage as an institution on whole and how either sex really considers their idealistic, loving union from very mater-of-fact practicality, when there is no longer a mutually cooperative goal (childrearing) as the centerpiece of that relationship.

Religion and/or a conviction that children are better raised by an involved two parent (male and female) family who are both mutually invested in the success of their kids is generally a bond that both parties mutually agree to as the cornerstone of their marriage.

Once that goal has been met (or termed out) then that relationship must be reestablished and based on a genuine interest and desire for the other person. For a man this may involve his realizing an understanding of tenets of the Game that he’s, until then, unwittingly been a party to. For women this may be a longing for renewed interest from extra-marital (but not necessarily infidelity) attentions and desire from other men.

It’s kind of telling how men’s idealistic concept of love endures beyond his late-life Epiphany stage. In spite of having experienced the consequences and all-downside risks men face in their prior marriages, it’s still overwhelmingly men who want to remarry and take another shot at that idealism.

It is women, in either their veiled pragmatism or their aging, unrealizable opportunistic concept of love who are more or less indifferent to the prospects of remarriage.

These stats alone are more than enough to verify my assertions of how either sex hold different concepts of love.

Men still dream of an idealistic love, and women have find precious little use for men beyond the practical when presented with the prospect of having to optimize Hypergamy at an age they are no longer capable of intersexual competition.

What exactly is intimacy? What does that look like in a Redpill context?

I used to think I knew what intimacy was, in a blue pill way at least. And I have come the realization that intimacy is either not worth shit, or I simply don’t get it. What I do know is that those times were I was informed intimacy had been achieved were not correlated with my feeling comfortable, more secure or less anxious rather it was the opposite.

This is a good question.

In my writing I use the term ‘intimacy’ as a sort of confirmation of a woman’s genuine interest, but I don’t think I’ve ever really defined it.

Strictly from a PUAs sense I would say intimacy is a woman’s sexual availability – in no uncertain terms it’s confirmation of her intimate interest and acceptance of you, but then again, in my own sexual past I’ve had more than one fuck-buddy with whom I really didn’t share any real intimacy with.

In those instances I was (at least perceived) a point or so above these women’s SMV and enjoyed all the Alpha benefits that arrangement afforded me, but beyond the sexual, I had no real interest in any kind of intimacy, shared or not.

In a sense, I actually had a much deeper intimacy with the three fuck-buddies I would bang in my 20’s than the women with whom I’d invested myself with in more “meaningful” relationships. You see, with my fuck-buddies all pretense of caring about what they thought of me personally (and certainly from a long-term investment) was simply a non-issue. I was free to express as much or as little of myself as I wanted because I wasn’t actively qualifying for their future investment in me. My Frame was dominant from the outset – sex-on-call is a pretty strong indicator of dominant Frame.

When I was writing the final edits of the Wait For It? post for the Rational Male book I felt that I needed to add a caveat towards the end of that section to account for a sense of intimacy for red pill men, who by conviction or otherwise, weren’t comfortable with actually fucking a woman to confirm genuine desire.

The point of that being that sex isn’t necessarily a determinant of intimacy, but rather the real desire for that person and the want for a mutual connection (to be consummated by sex) creates a condition of intimacy.

“When one considers that one must “game” a woman, even your wife, in order to keep her around, then it also means that you must always be operating at a “higher level” than her. It totally negates the whole notion of having a “soul-mate” and means that on many levels, a man will always be alone.”

That is probably the most important lesson a man can ever learn.

Intimacy with a woman is impossible if you have any interest in being her lover. If you are fine with being one of her grrrlfriends, and don’t mind the stupid messed up games women run on them, then you can share to your heart’s content – and will always be on the LJBF ladder.

The fundamental problem with today’s concept of marriage is that it seems both men and women expect their spouse to be all things to them – lover, confidante, helpmate, “soulmate”, co-housekeeper, and co-wage-earner. With so many role demands, it is inevitable that everyone will fail at some of them. That is why the old division of roles worked fairly well for most people – each could concentrate on a few things they were good at, and leave the rest to the other person.

Zenpriest outlines one of the fundamental differences between a forced egalitarian equalist approach to relationships with the natural complementary approach – intimacy between two autonomous, self-sufficient, self-reliant individuals is an impossibility in a sustained relationship. If there is a complete self-sustaining independence between both partners (an eqaulist idealized state) then there is no true purpose for intimacy between the two.

Buena Vista:

I have been the Alpha Fucks, the Beta Bucks, and I have been both at the same time. Civil marriage requires a man, as Deti notes by inverse example, to commit to permanent Game. Permanent Game rarely involves true intimacy. This is the reality of the Plan B Nice Guy in marriage.

Eon:

It seems that intimacy, like love, is only possible if you are greater than (and thus truly independent of) the object of your love.

Softek:

In my opinion, intimacy is unchanged by the red pill. It’s the ideas and perceptions about it that are changed.

There’s a lot of dichotomy: sex, attention, and affection are all thought of as needs, but at the same time, if you’re not getting any of those things, the only way to get them is to take on the mindset of having an abundance of them.

And the guys who seem to have free access to all of those things have access to them because they don’t care if they have access to them or not.

In any relationship, the person with the most power is the one who needs the other the least.

Although in an extreme this may seem manipulative to the uninitiated, this balance exists in every relationship irrespective of whether one party is intentionally using that power or not. In fact the most frustrated men you’ll ever meet are those whose women aren’t intentionally using the power his qualifying for her intimacy bestows upon her. He wonders why he can never merit her intimacy, while she, obliviously, wonders why he keeps trying to merit it.

As I illustrated in my fuck-buddies example, I was free to be as intimate as I chose with them because I literally had nothing to lose by doing so. And in that state of outcome indifference they wanted those occasions of intimacy far more than any woman I’d held in a high enough esteem to think I needed to qualify for their intimacy.

However, from a Red Pill perspective, I think the idea that “real” intimacy requires a constant effort of Game is in error. I’ve shared an enduring intimacy with Mrs. Tomassi for 19 years because Game and Red Pill awareness are simply part of who I am now. Game, if that’s even the right word for it, becomes effortless once you’ve made Red Pill truths an intrinsic part of who you are.

Learn this now, you will never achieve contentment or emotional fulfillment in a blue pill context with red pill awareness.

Most men’s concept of intimacy, like love, is shaped by his Blue Pill conditioning. The key to real intimacy is understanding how it can grow and be sustained in a Red Pill context. Chasing after an intimacy defined by the feminine suffers from the same misdirection of presuming women’s concept of love (opportunism) agrees with men’s (idealism).

So, weekend discussion questions:

How do you define intimacy?

Do you think men and women share the same concept and definition of intimacy?

Is ‘true’ intimacy only achievable when you have nothing to lose and nothing invested in a woman?

End Note: I’m well aware that intimacy has far broader inferences than just the relations between men and women, and I’m not attempting to pigeonhole the entire concept. There is intimacy with your family, your God, your pets, yourself and a variety of other things. However, even in those instances there is still a power dynamic at play.

The Mate Guarding topic of last week’s post made for some lively debate. It usually does because it’s this behavior, and the root motivators of it, that gets to the heart of dynamics such as an Alpha / Beta mindset, the Scarcity Mentality, Hypergamy, issues of morality and maybe an uncomfortable realization that your LTR has been subject to those motivators.

The purpose and approach men have with regard to mate guarding usually comes down to two positions.

The first being a moral high-ground idea that women do in fact have a moral or rational agency and thus have an obligation to keep their own Hypergamy in check. This may be from a religious perspective, but more often it’s based upon men’s idealistic equalist hopes that a woman can rationally be expected to parse her own investment in what men think should be Relational Equity.

Or in other words, women should know better, and be expected to cooperate with a male imperative by self-regulating their Hypergamous impulses as a matter of personal and social responsibility.

On a limbic level Hypergamy doesn’t care about Relational Equity and openly appealing to a woman’s reason, rationality or sense of responsibility a man believes she should be beholden to is counterproductive in influencing her genuine desires. However, this is usually a self-guided hope that women will recognize and regulate those behaviors at the risk of being socially ostracized in an already feminine-primary social environment.

Again, this can be couched in a religious expectation, but in a secular-equalist sense it amounts to putting the burden of mate guarding on women by presuming their ‘equal rationality’ will result in women mate guarding themselves by policing their own Hypergamy in men’s best interests. Anything less either makes them convictionless or the nebulous “low quality woman” who wont play by the old-order rules and expectations.

The second approach is a proactive mate guarding based on the presumption that mate guarding is a ‘defense’ against mate poaching by other, presumably (but not necessarily) more Alpha men than the one doing the guarding.

Within that context it’s understandable why men would want to protect their personal investment in a woman. What woman wouldn’t be aroused by the prospect of being fought over by two men she perceives as Alpha rivals? It’s a strong affirmation of her desirability and SMV.

Where it turns into a Beta Tell is when a man’s lifestyle revolves around ‘keeping’ her in a possessive sense for fear of losing her because she’s his only viable option for sending his genetic material into the future. That kind of mate guarding is the kind inspired by a scarcity mentality, but it’s also due to long evolved, subconscious sensitivities to her behavioral inconsistencies at or around her time of ovulation.

This is what Dr. Hasselton was getting into in her studies – ovulatory shift in mate preferences created an evolved sensitivity of them in men which in turn produced contingency behaviors (mate guarding) to ensure he wasn’t wasting his parental investment efforts with a child that wasn’t his own.

I would argue that a contingent mate guarding strategy evolved not as a direct response to Alpha (or even Beta) competition stresses, but rather due to women’s innate Hypergamy, their sexual pluralism and the potential for parental investment deception when women were left with their Hypergamy unchecked.

If a woman’s predominant perception of you is Alpha, if her mental point of origin is one in which she recognizes her own SMV as being subordinate to your own, she wont be asking your “permission” to go to Vegas with her girlfriends for a weekend because her desire for her Alpha will be stronger than her peers influence on her during her ovulation week.

In theory, no woman who sees you as her perceived Alpha and Hypergamous best interest will want to ‘cheat’ on you – so the idea wont even occur to her. I realize this sounds simplistic until you consider the readiness with which most men will similarly isolate themselves socially, putting off friends and family in preference to spending his time with what he believes is a high-value woman.

Demonstrate, Never Explicate

From The 48 Laws of Power

Law 9

Win through your Actions, Never through Argument

Any momentary triumph you think gained through argument is really a Pyrrhic victory: The resentment and ill will you stir up is stronger and lasts longer than any momentary change of opinion. It is much more powerful to get others to agree with you through your actions, without saying a word. Demonstrate, do not explicate.

There is no greater demonstration of higher value for a man than walking away from a woman. Even a woman’s strongest perception of higher value cannot compete with the self-certainty of value a man has when he disconnects himself from a woman who’s already accepted him for her intimacy.

While Dread (even passive dread) is a strong signal of a man’s higher value, removing your own intimate acceptance from a woman and confirming the value her Hypergamous nature questioned about you is the last word in DHV.

For the first half of their lives, even the most mediocre of women become accustomed to men qualifying for their attention, intimacy and sexual access. Women quickly learn the utility of their first, best, agency with men – the power of sexual control.

So when that agency is proven useless with a man, that control is eliminated and she begins to question her capacity for that control. By removing himself from dependency on that agency he confirms that his SMV is more valuable than her own.

A lot of men report that their unprompted disinterest in sex with a woman, a wife, a girlfriend, often provokes a woman’s imagination with regard to her control and/or inspires a greater sexual determination to please him in order to reestablish this control when they next engage in sex.

There’s precious little that’s more effective at reestablishing Frame for a man than the demonstration of higher value walking away from a woman’s accepted intimacy represents. Some of the best sex you’ll have in your life will come after a reunited breakup.

Now, the reason I’ve detailed this is because the foundations of a man maintaining Frame within a relationship are rooted in limiting or removing this sexual agency and demonstrating higher value as part of that process.

Establishing Boundaries

London Towers on the SoSuave forum started a fairly contentious debate on how a man ought to establish boundaries within a relationship last week:

In my last LTR I never set boundaries, let her hang with her ex, guys, never got jealous, just didn’t give a fuck…because my life was going well and I had no insecurity she wouldn’t do anything because I was the shit. She even wanted her ex to hang with us, just so she could show me off. This actually seemed to work for me as I had some natural alpha state for the first 1 year due to life success and she could feel this, thus other guys were just orbiters. I would even joke to her about who she found attractive in the bar, that’s how self confident I was. This would actually make her want me more.

Then cracks in my game came out, I was going through a rough patch with life and suddenly the game shifted. She would start to compare me to other guys including her ex in a negative way. I suddenly became insecure because I didn’t feel Alpha anymore due to life not going well and suddenly started enforcing boundaries which she would constantly test because she knew I lost my game unlike when I was Alpha and didn’t give a shit. Enforcing boundaries was actually coming from an insecure place and I don’t think your words mean shit if you ain’t got your game tight.

Now, I’m not too sure how I would handle my next LTR. I’m in the process of becoming alpha again, but now truly alpha as in my inner game this time. But would I now still have the not give a sh1t attitude if my girl still hung out with her ex/guys?

Part of me thinks if my game is tight, I give her great sex, pluck at her emotional spectrum, she rides on the magic carpet of my exciting life (which comes from knowing my life mission) she will be hooked on me in a multiple of ways and if she knew I would drop her cold and can easily replace her if she doesn’t provide me with the affection/sex that I need.. she will enforce her own boundaries.

This is the only true boundary I can provide. A girls attention will drop if she starts even emotionally to involve someone else. At that point you just freeze immediately. So the only boundary you can ever enforce is through your attention and her subtle awareness you have options and will walk away with ease at the very beginning of her not providing for your needs. That loss is something she could not deal with.

I’d encourage readers to take the time to read through that discussion and the various approaches to establishing boundaries within a relationship (or even non-exclusive plates you may be spinning). After picking through the differing perspectives I made the connection between establishing boundaries and men’s natural predilection for mate guarding behaviors.

Most of the expressed perspectives tend to side with either of the two mate guarding approaches I mentioned at the beginning of today’s post; one, in which women are rationally expected to police their own Hypergamous impulses, and the other, where an active (and equally reasoned) explicating of boundaries are overtly declared as an ultimatum in an effort to protect a man against the parental investment risks of being cuckolded by a woman he knows can’t be expected not to otherwise succumb to her Hypergamous impulses.

If you notice how London Towers’ story unfolds here he essentially proceeded by demonstrating his higher value, secure in the confidence of it, only to have that DHV eroded due to his life’s circumstance.

This is when the boundary of Alpha indifference he’d organically set (albeit unknowingly), based upon his value, was challenged in his drop of status and esteem. I’ve elaborated in the past about a man’s burden of performance or how women’s concept of ‘love’ is based on a passive opportunism of what a man is (rather than who he is), but you get the picture illustrated for you here.

Next, commenter Soolaimon picks up the opposite end of the extreme:

These boundary guys have it ass backwards.

They are judging women by their words instead of judging them by their actions.

Judge women by their actions and not their words.

Agreeing to a boundary is only her words that these guys think will keep her from cheating.

Women who cut out other men from their lives on their own is a woman who understands what an exclusive relationship is.

Those are her actions you judge her on.

Not useless words she can go back on at any moment.

[…]

Smart classy intelligent women already know what exclusivity means they don’t need to have it defined when they are defining it for you by removing other men on their own.

Women do that for Alphas and not betas who need to set a boundary out of fear.

Women that are really into you will agree to what you want with no problem.

When they lose interest they will still cheat on you making your boundary useless.

If your woman knows what exclusivity means and has the same values as you why are you so terrified to put a ring on her finger and marry her?

There’s a lot to consider when you establish boundaries with a woman. Essentially those boundaries men wish to establish and have respected by a woman really just amount to a codified form of mate guarding.

When you think about it, this is what (at least in an old social order) the marriage contract was meant to insure from a male-beneficial perspective – an assurance of fidelity, but also a contractual insurance against Hypergamy.

Considering the contemporary risks involved, in the current social environment there are any number of reasons men are wary of marrying a woman, but what marriage has become is really a challenge to what a man believes about mate guarding and his confidence in controlling a woman’s Hypergamous nature based upon his degree of desirability to her.

Though I don’t disagree in principle, Soolaimon’s exaggeration is founded on the idea that there’s always going to be a bigger fish; another AMOG to seize your woman’s interest should your combination of Game, material and emotional provisioning, or ambition for such be lacking.

Like most absolutists, he does little to contextualize the preconceptions a woman may have with a particular man they’re already involved with. A woman may fantasize about sex with a more Alpha male during her ovulatory phase, but that doesn’t mean she has the opportunity to realize it – even for “smart classy independent women”.

That said, and after London Towers’ example, it’s impossible not to come to a conclusion that implied, demonstrated boundaries – ones that have actionable consequences of intimate and invested loss (i.e. Dread) – are preferable to explicated, but ultimately appealed-reason declarations of boundaries that are negotiated insurance policies to limit her Hypergamy.

While I do believe boundaries are a necessary part of a relationship, it’s far better for women to discover them for what they are, and the consequences of them, by demonstration rather than overt explanation.

The hand burned by the stove teaches better than any warning.

The only person who’s behavior you can control is your own, but that behavior can have a significant impact on the behaviors of others.